


The Once and Future King (there's no way this all could go terribly wrong)

by Thefractured



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series), Dungeons & Dragons - All Media Types, Escape from the Bloodkeep - Fandom
Genre: Companionable Snark, Evil Plans, Fluff and Angst, Good and Evil, M/M, Past Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:00:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23593471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thefractured/pseuds/Thefractured
Summary: Distracted by increasing desperation, Leiland’s first hint that something is wrong is the faintest scrape of jagged leg claw… from directly overhead.  “Oh,Leiland—” the whisper seems to come from everywhere, sultry, envenomed with menace.  “I thought we were past this.”
Comments: 15
Kudos: 68





	1. Chapter 1

Of the two, Miles’ crown of chains is by far the most difficult to find.

Retrieving Oswald’s is, by comparison, rather simple: Efink helps him fish it from the gelid pool of blood in the Tomb of Ultimate Evil. The blood itself, more enchantment than fluid, makes its way slickly back into the basin but the tufts of troll hair and gore that have wrapped around the circlet are more stubborn. Leiland picks the scraps free and lets them spiral down into the unending void that yawns beneath the Keep. 

“Are you sure you want him back?” Efink asks, gingerly testing her range of mobility. The obsidian splash tiles around the rim of the pool seem like fair game, but her hands press against an unseen wall when she tries to move them just beyond. Leland gives it about a day before she starts to tug seriously at her leash, and a week before she starts gaining ground. It is strange to be thinking in the timeframe of days or weeks now, rather than the heat of the immediate moment.

Leiland lets the chain circlet slide through his fingers, feeling each cold iron segment click against his bronze-gauntleted talon tips. Oily black smoke filters from the deep grooves and creases, just wisps now, but they’d grow thicker over the next few hours, reforming the Vinguri shard by infernal shard. Well, probably. Maybe. He’s making some fairly large assumptions here; uncharted territory, as it were. “In the end, he knew his true Dark Lord,” Leiland says, although Oswald’s profession of fealty struck him as the least bit suspect, given as it was just after that Leiland ripped Toby’s immortal soul, thin and wailing, from his physical form and clenched it twisting in his fist. “And he always had an admirable appreciation for fine art.”

Efink isn’t really listening. “I do hope they don’t mean to string those miserable bridges all over everything,” she mutters as the first of the goblin repair teams make their way to the chamber, their wide lamplike eyes backscattering the faint glow of the pool, spindly fingers clenching nervously around such scraps of wood and chain and debris as they’d scavenged from the rest of the citadel. Upon his crowning, the Lord of Shadow’s powers -- unpracticed and instinctual as they were – had largely quelled the looting and mutiny, imposing an uneasy kind of peace. Lilith’s scuttling brood had handled whatever goblins and orcs had resisted their Lord’s compulsion, which was good, because even Leiland could see that the kids really needed a snack after so much excitement. 

“Skull pillars don’t just install themselves,” Leiland points out, although the floor at least is doing exactly that, one flagstone at a time. “Load bearing or otherwise.”

“Oh, I suppose,” Efink sighs, studying the little cluster of goblins as if counting up the number of heads between them. “You there! Start with a platform over here. I’ll be damned if I’m going to try to sleep on this boat. And can we get a cage? A cage, anyone? Oh come on. A chain then, at least.”

To be fair, Olag doesn’t seem much inclined to escape. His ghastly, half-peeled form is still sobbing in one of the few fully-intact corners. His ragged nails claw and clutch at the floor as he writhes in undying anguish under J’er’em’ih’s many watchful eye stalks. “As a dammed thing,” Leiland points out, “the frailties of the flesh may be beyond you.” 

Efink gives that some thought, studying the blood that streaks her outstretched arm. Her skin is pale, almost translucent, perfectly normal for the high elf. “Does it take a while to settle in? Because I could just *slaughter* some chocolate and a nice glass of wine right about now.”

Leiland wasn’t sure about the chocolate, but the wine – “No, that’s pretty normal, at least in my experience.” There are enough flagstones now, floating unsupported in their places, to make the walk back to the tomb’s entrance a relatively easy one. Only one or two of the goblin repair crew had tumbled into the endless black so far, although the day was still young. Leiland pushes himself up from the rim of the blood pool, slipping the thin iron crown over his gauntlet. “I should really help Sokhbarr drive the last of the invaders from the borders.”

“Mmn, well, make sure to be back by this evening, or you’ll miss the champagne,” Efink says, trying to squeeze fluids out of her sleeve. Apparently giving up the whole thing for a lost cause, she starts to peel herself out of the sticky robes. “Oh, and I see a snapping pennant over frost iron, where crimson flowers fade to black.”

Leiland hesitates. “That’s… good to know. Thank you.”

Efink waves him away, distractedly. “Have fun, there’s no rush!”

There really isn’t. Because around the time Leiland’s boots crunch down into the flowstone and pumice of the Scary Volcano’s slopes, bronze on gray, it occurs to him that Oswald’s crown really hasn’t made much progress. It still smokes. But even when he gives the iron circlet a firm shake, there’s no familiar glimpse of shards of demonic flame or non-Euclidian realms of madness and despair. Leiland is here to pick up Hamhead’s trail; it has been just more than twenty-four hours since Oswald collapsed into ash. He should be seeing something.

Tossing his plaguebat’s reigns over a broken upthrust of stone, Leiland makes his way down to the ravine where he’d found bare halfling footprints, once before. Blowing ash has wiped them away now, but between the mountain’s sulfuric belches, a trace of scent lingers – green growing things, bacon, sunlight. Leiland circles wide around the trail, ranging in quartermile loops across the cragged and steaming landscape. The terrain is difficult, and even with the liberal use of levitation, jagged pumice snatches and squeals at his boots. Pieces of airship litter the hillside, some burned and some burning.

Near a slow, blebbing flow of lava, where scraps of torn canvass fan the billowing gasses, he finds it. There’s nothing left of Miles by now except his crown of chains. Thin fingers of frost radiate around the segmented black iron, drawing tattered white runes out onto the smoking pumice. But the crown hasn’t begun the familiar process of spinning armor up out of frost and hatred, imbuing those frigid plates with unlife. Maybe it’s too dry here. Or too warm. Leiland doesn’t know. 

He lets the grooves and curves of the pact-seal slip between his fingers, lingering on the smoothness, the spiked links. Then he slides the crown over his gauntlet, lets it click against Oswald’s at his elbow, and turns back for his plaguebat. 

Leiland’s never been on a hunt alone before, and to be honest, he’s not sure this even qualifies. He’s even less certain how to go about asking a boon of the Lord of Shadows, Worm of the Worldcore – it was really difficult to tell if the Dark Lord was getting cranky. Also, both of these Vinguri had battled the Lord of Shadows’ mother and tried to keep the newborn Lord from his throne, so there was that. And… and yet they’d fought by Leiland’s side for centuries, growing stronger with every goodly or disobedient thing they'd ground beneath their boots, working side by side in service of something beyond mortal understanding, for the final peace of a last gasping breath, for the physical embodiment of domination itself. He knew these men. Or... he thought he'd known them.

So. You know. There was that, too. 

But naptime or no, the Dark Lord would surely be more receptive to a plea if it came on the heels of a victory. Surely. Leiland drives the hooked point of his boot into the armored stirrup with perhaps a little more determination than necessary, drawing a high-pitched howl of protest from his mount. Massive membranous wings thrash unhappily as the sole remaining pactwraith swings himself astride the lightweight saddle, sawing back on the corded reigns.

“To the Door of Doom,” Leiland intones, jerking his bat’s gnarled and folded muzzle to the sky, resolution burning blue hoarfrost in his breast. His vow is a resonant hiss in the sulfur air. “Galfast Hamhead, your time on this plane grows short.” The circlets around his arm chime as the bat’s wings lash out, lifting them up and into the gloaming skies. 

The accursed halfling gardener was on foot, on terrain like this, a hundred miles of poisoned wilds between it and the relative safety of the starforged lands. With any luck, Leiland would be back in time for snacks.


	2. Chapter 2

Leiland is not back in time for snacks.

In fact it takes him eleven days to crawl -- metaphorically speaking -- back to the Bloodkeep. The plaguebat has enough intact wing leather to make the flight from the great smoking crater rim up to the Aerie, so at least his return doesn’t *look* entirely like the failure it is. In order to manage this feat, Leiland had to lead the beast across the Khal Ravenwrath plains for several hours, plus apply no small quantity of encouragement to even get it to lift off that final time, but he’d be blessed before he walked the thing through the front gates like some hell-forsaken Alroc trader.

He needn’t have bothered; no one seems to be around to see him arrive, except the goblins who take his reigns and stare in dismay at the half-dead plaguebat’s multilayered cuts and bites and scrapes. 

The heavy crunch of his boots onto obsidian tile doesn’t sound quite as dramatic without the echo of four other pairs behind him. The cold wind that accompanies his passage does not scour the walls as it should, and to be completely honest, Leiland doesn’t have enough energy left to summon the chill repulsion needed to glide over the floor – not without an audience to impress, anyway. But the Aerie’s vast double doors still respond to his will, yawning wide for him. Goblins and darker things scurry from his path as the pactwraith stalks towards his quarters -– a wise choice, given Leiland’s glower.

Ordinarily, he’d have pressed on until he had some success to report, until he’d drenched Griefmaker’s blade in blood and spread despair through a hamlet or two, at least. Or, or *something*, anything to make it easier to spin the story on yet another failure. For this, there would be consequences; he knew that much. It wasn’t exactly easy to inflict… correction on a pactwraith, whose flesh was more necromantic energy than physical substance. But Zaul’Nazh had been a creative Master. Of course, such attentions were infinitely better than Zaul’Nazh’s disappointment, the inevitable turn of his regard to focus on a more promising arch-general. It was always better to return with some measure of success.

And since that wasn’t possible this time… well. Leiland had better look his hell-damned best.

At least he could swap out his fading cloak of shadows for a fully charged one, before he went to offer the Dark Lord his report. There might be a few slips of glyph paper left at the bottom of a drawer, too, cleaning cantrips to remove the worst of the dust and grime from his armor. He’d not needed them for decades, but he’d spent his last spell to freeze a splint to that damned bat’s wing, and –

Leiland comes to a hard halt just outside the huge iron-bound door to his chambers, gauntleted hand hovering inches over the opening sigil. His head slowly tilts, pale hair sweeping the collar of his massive, plated chestpiece, cold blue eyes flaring. And then, with all the effortless, powerful grace of one of the greatest undead ever to stalk the mortal realms, he rears back and kicks the door open. 

“And to imagine, I believed we were long beyond this,” Leiland snarls, voice laced with the kind of cold that kills, stalking inside.

“Oh come on! Don’t be such a boomer!” Kyle’s hulking black shape scuttles across the ceiling and through the crest of the antechamber archway, smaller spiders tumbling off his back with little squeals of surprise. A complicated webbing… contraption is strung from wall to wall, silk anchor lines stretching from the open windowsill to the ceiling to the liquor cabinet – mostly obscured by a great mound of tight-wrapped webbing -- and out to the main chambers and destinations unknown.

“Uncle Leiland!” Oily-black, chitinous legs wave at him from a corner of the ceiling. “Mom didn’t send us, or she did but it was only the first time to put the tank together for J’eh’nni’fur and then Russell came and then we came to look for him because he wasn’t coming back and we didn’t—”

“It’s not like we have opposable thumbs or anything to get him out with. That top is hella slippery. Geez.” Kyle sulks.

Leiland stares, his hand falling away from Griefmaker’s hilt. “What?”

From the display cabinet, porcelain rattles. A tiny, muffled voice quavers out. “I think I webbed myself.”

This sets off the other small spiders on the ceiling. “It’s ok, so did Carl!" "I did not, you take that back!” 

“Quiet, guys. No, quiet, I’m gonna explain it to him ‘cause Mom’s busy, alright? But you gotta let me— ok, look. J’er’em’ih had puppies while you were gone, alright? So Sokhbarr left you one before he went home to check on things there, only we think it’s, like, aquatic. So--” Jessa, one of the largest of Lilith’s ten thousand black brood, attempts to explain. She was certainly one of the most responsible of her clutchmates, having been to design school and all.

“Puppies,” Leiland intones blankly, staring.

“Yeah, it’s even a scream beast puppy, I guess born of your nightmares or hellish ichor or something? So Sokhbarr left you one and we made a little home for her and everything—” Leiland leans over to look. The mass of webbing over on the sidebar is holding together several large sheets of glass, forming an aquarium of sorts. Green-brown sludge bubbles inside for a moment, before an eyestalk peeps up at him. “—and her name is J’eh’nni’fur and then Russell was worried that she didn’t have any food and I know you don’t like us going through your stuff but he came anyway but only for that and then—"

“I’m stuck,” wails Leiland’s fifth-favorite teapot.

Spiderlings scuttle out of Leiland’s way, hundreds of little legs scratching across the tiles, as he walks over to the display cabinet. The pactwraith carefully palms the delicate, glossy porcelain of the teaset and uses the tips of two gauntleted fingers to remove the lid. Russell, hardly larger from legtip to legtip than a gold piece, stares up at him. There is a neatly-wrapped (but slightly chewed) severed goblin finger inside the teapot with him.

“Phew! Thank you vewy much, Sir!” pipes the tiny spider, gratefully climbing out onto his fingers when Leiland tilts the teapot a bit. “I’m real sorry. I only wanted to make sure she was ok, ‘cause Mom says we should share so I just—" 

“It was very thoughtful. I’m… quite sure Lilith will be very proud of you,” Leiland hazards solemnly, as the little spider anchors a line on one of the raised runes that wrap his armor and starts to rappel down. The pactwraith makes a gesture towards the tank. “Shall I—”

“Yeah, dat’s what I brought it for!” Russell exclaims, watching him with eight beady little black, anxious eyes. Leiland gingerly empties the teapot out over the makeshift tank. The wrapped finger hits the surface of the sludge and is sucked promptly under. Dainty crunching sounds ensue. 

“Thank you, Uncle Leiland! Yeah, thanks! Danks! Ok bye!” The eighty or so spiders, apparently satisfied, all start for the window and the open doorway. The littlest ones like Russell climb onto the bulbous abdomens of their elder brethren – Jessica’s legs are as thick as a man’s wrist. Kyle hesitates. “Sorry for calling you a boomer,” he offers sullenly, and skitters out with the others. 

The flow of glistening black bodies ebbs at last, leaving Leiland alone with his confusion and his heavily-webbed entry hall. “What in the nine realms is a boomer?” the pactwraith asks his new… puppy?, gingerly setting the teapot next to all the others. "And since when am I 'uncle'?" Gauntleted fists on his hips, the hexwraith studies the room, not even quite certain how to get around all the anchor lines. The webbed tank burbles quietly.

There is a commotion back in the hallway. “Oh thank Dad you’re back. Leiland! Leiland! Where the hell did you--” 

The pactwraith’s glowing blue eyes snap up at the urgency -- no, the desperation -- in that shout. It’s a measure of his exhaustion that he nearly collides with Maggie as he rushes from his quarters, his hand on Griefmaker’s hilt. The tiefling hammerlord looks almost ragged, her hair standing up in frizzy tufts between her curling horns, her cardigan and corduroy slacks all in disarray. She smells faintly of burning wool. “My Regent Queen—” Leiland starts, and then a swaddled purple bundle is being shoved in his general direction. 

“I need to see Mom. You can babysit, right? Just for, like, a couple hours. Lilith’s working on a treaty and Efink has this spirit convention so—"

“W-- N—” a sound that Leiland has never even heard before comes whining up from someplace in the pit of his belly as he recoils hard against the wall, and it was good he wasn’t levitating because he probably would have gone straight up the stonework. 

“Oh its not cannon science, Leiland. Just support his head. Don’t drop him. Easy peasy. I’ll be back!”

“Erk—” Leiland manages. Some trace of instinct, older even than his death, brings his arms up in a loosely crossed posture across his armored chest, and suddenly the Lord of Shadows is in his arms and something in him seizes and he cannot move, his half-substantial flesh trembling with a combination of awe and abject terror. 

The Dark Lord blinks up at him, eyes like endless, starless voids, and blows a humming little raspberry.


	3. Chapter 3

“Ah.” Leland swallows heavily against the rising panic. “M-Master. My Lord.” He can feel the heat of the infant Destroyer of Realities even through his armor, and tries to tuck his ghastly, chill aura deeper beneath the semi-physical energies that serve as his skin. He twitches forward, a reflexive attempt to follow after Maggie because maybe he could catch her but she is just *gone* and even if he could find her, he isn’t certain he could trust himself to hand the Dark Lord back. He might be shaking too hard. He'd *slain* humanoid infants before, razed villages and more -- how the hell was he supposed to take care of one? What if he squeezed too hard, or moved too fast, or froze something, or, or -- everything in him wants to find someplace safe to put the Dark Lord but where could he even...? 

"Bwwwwarb," says the Dark Lord, and Leiland looks down, only to be caught, hooked, by the endless black of the Lord's void eyes. 

“Does my Lord desire… a tactical report?” Leiland finds himself saying.

The Lord of Shadows, evidently pleased, attempts another breathy raspberry, adding a generous mouthful of foamy spit for good measure. 

Hoping very much that he correctly understands that as a ‘proceed, my servant,’ Leiland clears his throat. He should be kneeling for this. But. The means of doing so, without jarring or disturbing his Lord, are not immediately clear to him. “From… from the Scary Volcano, your loathsome quarry fled for the Swamps of Desolation.” 

“Bababa,” says the Lord of Shadows.

“Certainly I pursued her, my Lord,” Leiland is quick to assure his Dread Master. Following tracks through the blackmoss and mud was at least possible, but the humid stink of decaying meat obscured all other scents. Worse, the interlocking labyrinths of blackened twigs and branches afforded but brief glimpses of buttressed trunks and putrid pools from the air. 

“Brrwrmn.”

“For two days, I endeavored to follow her path through the swamp,” Leiland starts, slowly. A pactwraith ghosted easily over trembling hillocks of vegetation and stagnant water alike. But unlike wyverns, plaguebats couldn’t be chained to a hillside in these troll-infested lands and left for a time – not if Leiland wanted to return to a live animal, anyway. Nor could a creature of such simple intellect really be trusted to follow its rider from the air. As it turned out, dragging a squalling, gargantuan bat through a swamp was remarkably problematic. There’d been the crocodile incident, the vine lasher incident, and the shambling mound incident, and that wasn’t even counting all the brown puddings. Or the mosquitoes. “Thereafter, I canvassed the border of the swamps and the Redsmoke Rifts.”

The Dark Lord wriggles, kicking vigorously at the bend of his elbow. Little purple hands reach for the points of Leiland’s shoulder pauldron spikes, tiny black claws flexing. With infinite caution, scarcely daring to move more than an inch at a time, Leiland shifts his grip to tuck the armored fingers of one gauntlet behind the Great Destroyer’s neck and back. Then he brings the Lord up to within grabbing distance of the looming bronze spines. “Hehehe,” the Lord of Shadows says, patting them enthusiastically.

Leiland feels like he might need a seer to interpret that. “Wh-- when I located the trail again, I was but hours behind your quarry, my Master. In the narrow rift through which Galfast Hamhead fled, however—” Leiland hesitates, trying to determine how to phrase this. The Lord of Shadows gives a squeaky hiccup and spits up a coiling little filigree of flame. 

“Just so, my Lord,” Leiland intones, guttural and layered, remembering. He’d been tracking low, only twenty feet over the sucking sand at the very bottom of a rift – and then to the clang of an iron frying pan striking flint, the canyon wall caved in. “Evidence suggests that, while aboard one of the airships, the halfling secreted away a measure of gunpowder.” 

It’d taken a full day for Leiland to extricate both himself and the bat, much of which involved hammering frost spikes through slabs of stone as large as a halfling’s hill-home and then prizing them apart with relentless freezing and thawing. “I soon returned to the halfling’s trail, my Lord,” thoroughly dented and dragging the recalcitrant bat, “and pursued her even unto the Gorestone spires, where her path ended atop a broken plateau. There, I found a tawny feather, and impressions of wing strokes in the dust.” 

The Lord of Shadows burbles happily. But – there is something else too, something slow, subtle, insidious, a certain sense of… pressure. Leiland isn't sure how long it's been there. It is perhaps a little like the relentless undercurrent thrum, all-pervasive this close to the Bloodkeep, that reminded every darksome creature of whom it served. Yet this is something else, there is an amethyst kind of warmth about it, even heat, and it probably should have been anathema to the unending permafrost of Leiland’s very substance. But there is no discomfort in the grip, only sensation, like a lingering stroke against some indwelling seam at the core of him. As battered as he is, if Leiland didn’t intimately recognize this sensation, he might have paid it little heed. 

But Leiland had served Zaul’Nazh for centuries. 

And so Leiland waits, preparing, determined. If his soul is to be peeled from his physical manifestation, like the scab from a wound, he wants to collapse with the softest possible surface beneath the Lord of Shadows. He doesn’t think he’ll be fully disincorporated, and it will probably be slow, so that should give him time to drag the nearest tapestry down with him as padding. 

But the Dark Lord only wriggles into a more comfortable spot against a smooth part of his pauldron and blinks sleepily at him, eyes like the spaces between stars. He also drools into Leiland’s armor.

Despite his growing bewilderment, Leiland eventually continues. “I… was able to rule out involvement by the spires’ resident harpies –” by hunting down and pinning the local queen to a rock face, like a monstrous shrieking insect on the tip of Griefmaker’s necrotic blade, and compelling the answers from the creature’s fracturing mind while her remaining coven tore and ripped at him, “—and learned that two knights, mounted atop war griffons, crossed the border. They took the halfling aloft, and fled over the Doomwall, to the sunlight lands of men. I can pursue them, by your will. To the very worldend they may fly, but none shall escape your wrath.”

The Lord of Shadows does not see fit to reply. But the impression of being held, stroked by warm amethyst, hasn't faded. And it is in full consciousness of the threat implied therein that Leiland continues: “My Lord,” he says quietly. “With your infernal permission, a hunt across the border may prove easier if there were… more of us. Others of my kind.” He drew a slow, unneeded breath. “I have kept the crowns of two of the Vinguri.” 

Still no reply. The Dark Lord does not summon his birthright to speak with the Voice of the Bloodkeep, as he had the day of his coronation. Neither, however, does he rend Leiland’s undead soul into flashing ribbons for the pleasure of watching him twist, so there is that. “They can range farther than one wraith alone, no matter how devout,” Leiland offers. Also, they could hold the damn plaguebats; Miles at least had some passing talent for beasts. 

“They may notice what I do not,” Leiland adds. More than clues or tracks, it was just – it was really *hard* to be completely awesome, when no one was there to appreciate the amazing things he did. “And-- I-- ” He exhaled, a hollow breath of cold that shuddered down the hallway. What had the other wraiths been to him, in all truth? Had they been friends? He’d sacrificed them so readily. Squires, followers? He’d trained the pactwraiths, ridden with them, crushed the forces of men and elves and dwarves beside them, thoroughly enjoyed their accolades... but otherwise had very little to do with any of them. They’d returned to dark empty rooms whenever he had no need of their aid, for hell’s sake. And in his absence, Zaul’Nazh had given the other Vinguri so many reasons to despise him. Had they been servants? Evidence that Leiland could be easily replaced?

Slaves? 

The Dark Lord’s puffing little breaths fog his armor. 

What *had* the Vinguri been to him? 

“I—” and Leiland finds, in the end, that he does not know. Whatever he’d done, and they’d done, and all the blood between them, did it matter? Because… because what did he want them to be to him, now?

Gradually, Leiland realizes that the Lord of Shadows’ breaths have deepened, and he looks down. The Dread Lord has fallen asleep on his shoulder. He is snoring gently.

Leiland thinks for a time. Then he gathers his power – the sensation of pressure hasn’t faded, but it certainly doesn’t interfere with his native energies – and lifts his boots off the ground. Gliding with unearthly grace, he sets off down the hallway.

There had to be someone in this entire citadel who knew what to do.


	4. Chapter 4

Leiland tries Efink first, but he knows even before he gets to the Tomb that there is no support to be found here. A chorus of hollow howling echoes through the chamber; ghostly spirits swirl and flicker around the opened sarcophagi of ancient evils. Mummies sit upright in several of the coffins, watching enrapt, and clapping at what Leiland presumed were appropriate intervals. The four great statues at the corners of the room, physical manifestations of pure elemental evil, have been fully restored. Ruby eyes glowing, they comment on the magical malestorm before them, apparently pointing out particularly well-woven spells and fumbled passes. The general clamour is punctuated by Olaf’s occasional cries of “Just kill me! Please!”

In the center of all this chaos, Efink hangs suspended in a column of blood and frigid water, icy white and crimson blood writhing in tendrils and vines around her. The fountain has been expanded into two new bays, one of which holds the boatman’s skiff, the other stretching under a newly built structure, like the wooden deck of a much larger vessel. It looks, to Leiland’s unpracticed regard, like Efink is attempting to link the bloodfountain and the divining basins higher up in the citadel. How they’d managed to run the plumbing all the way to the main tower and then up thirty flights of stairs, Leiland has no idea.

All the noise and dancing lights rouse the Dark Lord from his slumber, and Leiland immediately retreats, seeking out quieter corridors. The calmest ones of all are laced with webs, and unthinking, Leiland heads there, where the shadows gather close and the faintest stirring in the air makes thin white strands bow and flare like sails in the night. 

Before long, the way opens into a vast and echoing cavern, natural cave features stretching from floor to shadow-hidden ceiling, the calciferous bones of the earth laid bare. Coins, bones, trinkets, punch voting cards, and other treasures litter the floor. The Lord of Shadows is still wriggling and making small unhappy noises, and Leiland does not know how to fix this. He tries, of course – he roams the cavern, searching for some combination of movement, lighting, echo, humidity, or temperature that might calm his Lord. Nothing seems to work. Leiland has some basic understanding of the physical needs of a human adult – but an infant demigod Tiefling-I’reu hybrid? 

Distracted by increasing desperation, Leiland’s first hint that something is wrong is the faintest scrape of jagged leg claw… from directly overhead. “Oh, _Leiland--_ ” the whisper seems to come from everywhere, sultry, envenomed with menace. “--I thought we were past this.”

The pactwraith looks up into a perfect caramel visage, dark-eyed, immortally beautiful – the last sight untold thousands had ever seen. Farther up, the shadows ripple with oily black chitin, all plates and thorns. Thousands of tiny eyes catch the faint glow shed by Leiland’s skin, fracturing and reflecting, glittering like stars in the black above.

“Help,” Leiland mouths silently.

Lilith blinks, refocuses. Then she anchors a line – a silken rope two fingers thick -- and turns to lower herself swiftly down. As she leaves the concealing darkness, her massive abdomen hisses against the hanging stone stalactites, and it seems absurd that so huge a creature could have moved up so silently. The Dark Lord hiccups fitfully, tiny features screwed up uphappily, as Lilith’s bladelike legtips touch the cavern floor, eight quiet clicks, one after the other. At Lilith’s full height, the Leiland could walk under her legs with scarcely the need to duck, though she sinks somewhat lower as she comes fully to ground.

“Oh, sweetheart. There, there. Oh yes, there we are,” Lilith croons, and her voice is still husky-low, but the poison is gone. She scoops the Destroyer of Realities effortlessly from Leiland’s arms, handling the infant with practiced grace. Then, bewilderingly, she moves him up and down with little jouncing motions, like repeatedly rebalancing an unwieldy load. But the unhappy little sounds stop almost immediately. “I am so sorry, Leiland darling. The little ones said you were here, but not why.” She glances around – in his blind wandering, Leiland has gone some distance. Several twitching, man shaped packages of white silk are adhered to the nearest pillar, close to translucent sacs containing dozens of silvery pearls. Somehow, he’d ended up near Lilith’s creche, and the danger he’d been in gradually begins to dawn on Leiland. 

Lilith takes a moment to study him, with that kind of regard that seemed to effortlessly peel away all his defenses. How she manages such a feat while simultaneously holding the wriggly Lord of Shadows, Leiland had no idea at all. “Why don’t we go someplace more comfortable?” Lilith purrs. “We both deserve a glass or two, I think – and the children should have a charging cable for that cloak of yours, too.”

“I --Oh.” It really does look more like a cloak of patchy shade, rather than shadows. “That sounds – yes. Thank you.” Leiland unbends his arms; it feels like they’d rusted into position. As he turns to follow Lilith and the young Dark Lord, the hexwraith cautiously lets his chill hoarfrost aura unfurl from where he’d packed it tightly inside his physical manifestation. The sense of relief is nearly palpable. Fine chains of rhimefrost radiate from Leiland's feet as moisture crystallizes from the air. 

“Here we are,” Lilith leads him over to a more familiar section of the cavern. Wherever four stalagmites cluster close together, web slings have been woven to form backrests and seats of a kind. Other stone upthrusts have been linked together to make slightly-stretchy tabletops. Lilith makes herself comfortable, hooked legtips catching the cords of far larger hanging webs to support her spider abdomen, while still letting her ‘sit’ at roughly a human height. Subadult spiders fan out from her hulking form, skittering through the assorted treasures on the ground. Lilith sorts through a woven silk pouch, one of many adhered here and there throughout the webs, and produces a crumbly brown wafer. The infant Lord of Shadows gums on it enthusiastically. 

Leiland lets himself slump down into a chair nearby, the webs flexing easily beneath his weight. His body does not ache as a human’s might – he vaguely recalls that feeling, although after these hundreds of years he can’t be sure if those are real memories or only recollections of the stories he’s heard – but even still, he will not pass up the chance to simply rest, recover his concentration. “Thank you, Lilith.” Something bumps his hand, and Leiland blinks down as a dog-sized subadult spider presses a crystal plate into his palm. “And thank you --?”

“I’m Oliver!”

“Oliver,” Leiland nods solemnly, peeling out of the cloak. The only truly physical portion of the artifact is an engraved collar; he clicks it into the crystal plate and attaches the thin golden leads. “I apologize for intruding on your domain, Lilith.”

“Quite alright, dear,” the massive drider says. “I’m glad Maggie found someone to babysit. I was meeting with the female Huorns of the north, and only saw her message just now, or I would have offered.” 

“My Regent Queen found me, yes. But. After I reported my failure to the Lord, I – it wasn’t clear what –I didn’t know --”

“It’s alright, Leiland. Not to worry,” Lilith purrs. Tiny spiderlings peer around her back, clearly fascinated by the Lord of Shadows, but wary of being bitten again. “I’d be happy to show you how to care for him, if you like. Your hunt for the halfling didn't go well?”

Leiland closes his eyes briefly, then shakes his head. He gives Lilith the entire story. Actionable intel was shared among the Lieutenants after report, barring only direct order of the Dark Lord. The arrangement was informal, but they’d come to it centuries before, just to cut down on the infighting and spying. They all might be evil, but there certainly wasn't any need to be _inefficient._

“Griffons. I see,” Lilith says, when he finishes. The Lord of Shadows waves his soggy biscuit at the reluctant spiderlings, as if trying to tempt them closer. “Well – I know how much you want to pursue her, but I commend your self-control. It will be good to have you here for a while; we have so much to do, and no one knows our defenses like you. And I’m sure our Lord will send you out again soon enough.”

Leiland sighs. “It will take some effort to determine where to look, I fear. There are at least five strongholds among the races of men which train battle griffons, to my knowledge. There may be independent traders of the beasts, as well.”

Lilith cradles the Dark Lord with four strong legs, freeing her hands to take wine glasses and a dusty bottle from subadult spiders. “Did you collect any – aah, excellent.” She examines the feather that Leiland hands over. “This should be plenty to scry with. Oh, Efink mentioned that you were looking for your Vinguri’s crowns.” 

Leiland nods. “Miles and Oswald. Toby's is lost; he fell in the battle at the Tomb. And Declan – well.”

Lilith seems very focused on pouring the wine. “Let me ask you a hypothetical, Leiland. You have extensive dealings with the necromancer’s guild, don’t you?”

“Certainly. Coordinating Zaul’Nazh’s undead forces required it. I find many of their ventures quite interesting, as well.” They weren’t necessarily his favorite people on the team – it seemed like every decade, he had to dangle one lich’s phylactery or another over the lip of the Scary Volcano, just to drive home the point about who was is charge. Necromancers tended to become arrogantly accustomed to being served by the undead, and the Vinguri were undead, so – Leiland understood the source of the misunderstanding. But still, it got tiresome after the eighteenth or nineteenth time.

Lilith passes him a glass. “Well then – what would happen if one necromancer were asked to take over another’s, ah, prize project?”

Leiland winces. He’d seen it before: the shrieking, the property destruction, the wholesale disintegration of all the first necromancer’s works. “Terribly aggravating. Each of them seems to have their own artistic vision. Are we having difficulty raising the homeguard undead?” One more thing to add to his ‘to do’ list.

“No – well… yes, but that’s not my point.” The Dark Lord gives a little hiccup, and Lilith pats his back rhythmically. The gesture seems to please the infant Lord of Shadows, and Leiland files that away. “Dear -- you are essentially a necromantic construct,” Lilith says, and then hastens to add, “albeit an abnormally high-sentience one.”

“Err. Thank you, I think?”

“What I mean is -- Leiland. I think you can expect… some adjustments being made to your underlying energy weave. Tailoring, if you will.”

Leiland arches a brow. He lifts a gauntleted palm, the armor burnished bronze and shadowed with glyphs, rather than rotting black iron. There was no denying that the armor was more protective, even considering the open-faced helm. He certainly had more peripheral vision. Also it looked completely awesome. “I should think that would be obvious.”

Lilith takes a sip of wine. “More than cosmetic, Leiland.” 

Leiland leans back in the web chair, turning that over. He’d been raised for service, for fealty, made for it. He was his Lord’s to destroy, if that was what He willed. But what if his Lord desired something – different? Should he not facilitate that, as best he is able? That gentle grasp is on him even still, a slow amethyst stroking down the core of him, where his soul is stitched to physical bindings. It should be a simple matter to prize those disparate halves apart -- Zaul’Nazh had certainly made it seem a trivial thing. 

“Do you… has my Lord said what He wills of me?” Leiland asks at last.

"He hasn't." Lilith smiles gently, showing fangs. “You know, Zee was obliged to exchange his soul to channel the powers of the Bloodkeep; the same is not true of our little Lord here. So I can’t be sure. But I know this much: he values enough of what you are to keep you. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have picked up your contract, as it were.” She contemplates her wine glass for a moment, then tilts her head elegantly towards the chain circlets slung around his forearm. “That doesn’t necessarily mean he sees a need to keep _them._ ”

Leiland looks down, turning his wrist so that the chain circlets clink and ring softly against one another, their twin trails of wispy black smoke and snowflake runes dancing, intermingling. “I think,” says Leiland finally, “that I saw too much of myself in them. And so I disliked them for… a very long time.” Until it was too late, in fact. "And that -- made them what they were." 

Lilith’s smile grows knowing. “They were insufferable prats, Leiland,” she says wryly. “But they were also *your* little band of spooky boys. That meant something. Means something.” Lilith studies him for a moment. “And I’m glad it does. Zee really wasn’t the best role model when it came to taking care of things that belonged to him.”

Leiland’s armored fingers curl against the web-wrapped armrest. “The keep was always impeccably maintained,” he says, arch.

“That wasn’t –” Lilith blinks, then sighs quietly. “Never mind, dear. Tell me, did Maggie mention where she was going?”

“Yes, actually. She said she needed to see her mother,” Leiland says, brows drawing together. 

“Really,” Lilith leans forwards, drawing out the word. She nestles the Dark Lord a little closer to her skin. “Now this should be interesting.”


End file.
